The present study examined the electrophysiological correlates of the psychological processing of possessive pronouns such as "wo de" (Chinese for "my"/"mine") and "ta de" (Chinese for "his") using a three-stimulus oddball paradigm. Sixteen participants were visually presented the stimuli (possessive pronouns, small circle and big circle). The results showed that, relative to non-self-relevant ...

We describe the systems submitted to the shared task on pronoun prediction organized within the Second DiscoMT Workshop. The systems are trained on linguistically motivated features extracted from both sides of an English-French parallel corpus and their parses. We have used a parser that integrates morphological disambiguation and which handles the REPLACE_XX placeholders explicitly. In partic...

This paper proposes a novel analysis of the exceptional agreement patterns in pronominal het ‘it’-clefts with order het-copula-pronoun Dutch. We argue that complex interaction clefts between case, and word can be explained from radical featural defectivity ‘it’: ‘it’ has third person (3p) feature, but no number, strength gender features. show is different all personal pronouns major dialect gro...

We report two experiments on the referential resolution of the German subject pronoun er and the demonstrative der (‘he’). Using the visual world eye-tracking paradigm, we examined the effects of grammatical role, thematic role and the information status of potential referents in the antecedent clause operationalized by word-order (canonical/non-canonical), in the context of active--accusative ...

While the referent of a nonreflexive pronoun clearly depends on context, the nature of these contextual restrictions is controversial. The present study seeks to characterise one representation that guides pronoun resolution. Our focus is an effect known as ‘‘implicit causality’’. In causal dependant clauses, the preferred referent of a pronoun varies systematically with the verb in the main cl...

The gender information in written Chinese third person pronouns is not symmetrically encoded: the character for "he" (, with semantic radical , meaning human) is used as a default referring to every individual, while the character for "she" (, with semantic radical , meaning woman) indicates females only. This critical feature could result in different patterns of processing of gender informati...

Background. Up to the age of 6, children have been shown to experience difficulties in the interpretation of pronouns (but not reflexives) by incorrectly allowing the pronoun to corefer with the local subject about half the time (e.g., Chien & Wexler, 1990). Explanations for this Delay of Principle B-Effect (DPBE) range from a deficiency in pragmatic skills (Thornton & Wexler, 1999) and the eff...